Briggs Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of Mark Briggs’ “Journalism Next” textbook deals with how to manage a highly-digitized life as a journalist.

We all have an e-mail inbox that we, hopefully, check at least once daily.  Others are constantly on Twitter or Facebook.  Everywhere we look, we see somebody tapping on their cell phone, writing a text message.  How do we keep track and organize these digital elements of our life?

Briggs suggests that we can organize our digital life in many ways.  We could separate our e-mail inbox into folders and filters.  Cloud computing is a way to save work documents online, says Briggs.  The added convenience of cloud computing is having work documents available anywhere an internet connection is.  It also helps the environment by cutting down on the amount of paper being used in a newsroom.

To-do lists can be managed on sites like Remember the Milk, and brainstorming perfectly fits in with the MindMeister website, which allows people to create brainstorming diagrams.

Data-driven journalism was also an important pillar of this chapter.  Briggs explained that reporters need to utilize databases and similar data storage systems to enhance their stories.  However, at the same time, the readers also want access to the same databases.

Ways that news operations can solve this problem is to keep a database of information, such as town hall meetings, and allow it to be accessible to everyone.  The chapter had a perfect example of a page on USA Today’s website that shows salaries of sports figures as a database.